Submitted by The Mozilla team has set February 10th as the release date of the next major Firefox version. Some of the more notable features to be included in Firefox 2 are in-line spell checking, some sort of anti-phishing functionality, and improvements to tabbed browsing. Elsewhere, Asa Dotzler made a posting about his thoughts on the preview of IE 7 Beta 2.
Wolf is out…bye bye fox.
Well, IE7 will get its ass kicked by both Opera 9 and Fx 2.0
And I cannot run IE7 for one simple reason : I am using MacOS-X !
Windows is really a crappy copy of MacOS
err… IE7 is no threat to firefox… heck it’s not even a threat to IE6 or IE5 for that matter. wow, they added tabs, but competely uglified the interface with no regard for usability
*LOL*
Your nick is fitting
There are leaders and there are followers; Microsoft again and again confirm with their copy cat actions that they’re are FOLLOWERS.
That sounds right. It’s a safe way to new ideas with a minimum of effort.
Let the others do the innovation and testing of ideas, and when they are mature… rip ’em off!
The rest of us consider it more fun to participate in the development of and implementing phases of new ideas.
Kind of like Firefox ripped off the information bar from IE.
What a superficial, uninformed view. Downright trollish, actually. But I’ll bite as I heard someone saying the same (although in a more articulate way).
IE 7 is an improvement, but will not stop the growth of Firefox. It might slow it down, but in itself it will not stop it.
The fundamental fact is that Firefox is first and foremost a tremendous achievement from the marketing point of view. It engaged its users on a scale that had been never seen before (while we have seen very good open source software before).
1. Firefox managed to create a huge marketing network. A lot of people who had no interest whatsoever in computer technology are excited about this product and spend time promoting it. They have a personal involvement in the project and in many cases have learnt a lot of things by using it (my dad now knows the difference between open source and freeware. He asked me to explain what a javascript exactly is. I mean, my dad!). They are not going back.
2. Among people with an intermediate knowledge, extensions provided a way to configure the browser to suit their needs. I could not live without them. They are not going back.
3. The people with advanced knowledge, will continue to hack their extension. Or doing useful work improving the code base, even without active development. Recently, after a lot of moaning about the memory leaks, someone developed a tool to report them. Immediately a lot of leaks were discovered and reported by users. Hacking, even low-level goofing around is too damn fun. They are not going back.
4. Developers seem to be listening to users complains and requests. Continuing on the memory leaks, they seem to have started work on it (see Firefox 1.5.01 improvement). And we know this type of low-level bug-squashing is by far the most tedious, time-consuming and complicated task you can think of.
5. Security might have marginally improved with IE 7, but I do not expect any gigantic leap in this direction (we have seen exploits pop out already). The codebase is (reportedly) an unwieldly mess hooked deeply embedded in the operating system. The only possibility for a radical improvement would be to a rewrite on the back of the experience acquired, which is not going to happen for a million reasons.
Actually, I think virtually nobody is going to go back or not switch because of it. IE 7 is a defensive move. Good for the press releases, good for the people who can not live without IE (those who have already considered switching but have decided against it for various reasons, such as apps using ActiveX). But nothing else.
Windows is really a crappy copy of MacOS
Whoa!~ Calm down there – I can just imagine where that’s going to lead.. eeish!
Windows and Apple will (hopefully in Msoft’s case) have a great browsing environment integrated into the overall OS. But really, Opera and Firefox have them beat in that they are cross platform with a (mostly) consistant UI. For that reason they are in a league of their own and form an important part of the (wait for it…) ‘netscape.’
Well done Mozilla, and Opera.
Edited 2006-02-07 10:57
I am using Safari 15% of my browsing time under MacOS-X, 85% is based on fx
And I was trying to joke about Windows and MacOS
Every firefox release was step climbing. FF 2 is sure going to be exciting step forward. Specially when we all are going to comare it with IE7. I’m sure FF 2 will bash IE7 even before it released
MS guys I know you are worried and you better be! Cause by lips and bound FF is getting popular. Main fact is FF is running quite securly even on Windows platform! I’m sure that is what is hurting MS a lot!
Long live Firefox and its supporters.
Well I think we will see an unfurtunat drop in FF usage when IE7 is released, abd for some contrys this wil mean the the ff ussage will drop below 10%. Firefox IMHO has an advantege iit that it’s multiplatform and (correct me if I’m wrong) Is used as the default prowser in clos to all linux distris, so for each state/provincial/Federal goverment or org that changes to linux FF will get new users. On that note are ther dtiros out ther rhat has changed to FF 1.5 trogh t5her updates or is that somting that is usualy done on an new rel.
Well, I don’t think we shall see a big drop. IE is in some way in its end of life, at least for windows users which are not under XP+Sp2.
The problem is, (and I expect to be modded down for saying this) that to most people, “the internet” *IS* the blue “e”. As soon as they hear there is an updated version they will be thinking “it is safe to use the internet propperly again”
What about the millions of Win2000 businesses who won’t be getting IE7 and can only upgrade away from IE to stay secure. Also with usage as high as 30% in some countries, there’s no way the number is going to go down.
Inline spellcheck will be great!
I love the inline spell checker in Konqueror. I think Lindows/Spire added this functionality to the Mozilla suite, and that’s one of the reasons they haven’t switched to FireFox. It’s exciting to hear that more people are going to check spelling before they post things, now! (including myself, as I use FF / Opera / Konqueror about equally).
The newest development version of the spellbound plugin for Firefox has inline spell checking. You can get it here: http://exchangecode.com/spellbound/downloads/spellbound-dev_2006010…
I assume that IE7 will be more standards compliant than its predecessors. This will mean that more people will make sites that look their best when viewed by a standard compliant browser. Together with Opera, Safari, and Firefox IE7 will form a new web platform that locks old ie6 users out.
As IE7 will not run on win2k systems, these users may have no other choise but to upgrade to Firefox or Opera to get a resonable web experience. As win2k still is very common this could more than make up for losses caused by new ie7 users.
Even if they don’t the loss will probably be very temporar as Mozilla is planning on releasing Firefox 3.0 in about a year, and by doing so keeping or even extending the technological advantage they currently hold over Microsoft.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter what browser people run, as long as it is standards compliant.
Anyway, it is nice to see some competition in the browser arena again, this will drive technology to advance faster. There are still a lot of things in the standards that never made its way to mainstream browsers. One thing I really would like to see is XForms, combined with AJAX would make it much easier to create a more dynamic web experience.
IE7b2 is almost indistinguishable from IE6 on the issue of standards compliance. Some irritating box model calculation errors were corrected, :hover now works with all elements, + and > CSS operators are implemented, PNGs are supported….
…but nothing else has changed. All the CSS1 and CSS2 properties which aren’t implemented in IE6 are still missing in IE7b2, even the ones which would have no effect on existing websites. Incorrectly implemented HTML tags like BUTTON and OBJECT continue to be broken regardless of what DTD you use.
The changes are almost cosmetic.
Unless the next beta of IE7 is remarkably different in its CSS/HTML standards support, it’s going to remain a browser built to a subset of CSS from 2001, and one which only runs on XP SP2/Vista.
Last time I checked, CSS1 was fully implemented (save some bugs).
What in CSS1 is missing?
I used to be worried that FF usage would drop and IE would once again be the dominant browser.
Why was I scared? It would take away my freedom to choose my browser. Lazy web developers would say “hey, why develop for anything but IE?” and that removes freedom.
I cant see that happening again. OSX is on the rise, desktop linux is on the rise and there are a lot of people out there using the Opera/Gecko/KHTML engines.
I can not see IE taking over 90% of the market even when IE7 is released. By then there may not even by a 90% windows share? Dream on
MS will not own the web again. This is a good thing and why I am not worried anymore
The thing I am looking forward with trepidation is the new tagged bookmarks (I know that there is an extension doing this, just wondering how this is going to be implemented by Firefox 2 – is it a feature already implemented in this alpha?)
This is the Next Big Thing (TM). I forecast an explosion of extension once the infrastructure is complete (e.g. integration in with the scrapbook extension and history, or with gooogle desktop search… you name it).
Thinking laterally, I might be the first way to familiarise users to semantically-oriented, multi-dimensional web of the future. Sorry if I am falling in the web 2.0 gibberish-speak (I am already sick of the mime maps)!
THANK GOD.
I sure hope they did something about the memory behaviour.
Running firefox for a few hours with multple tabs ends up in hundreds of megabytes used memory and swapspace.
These days, computers usually have a lot of memory, but it’s a nightmare when you need to run other memory hungry programs like vmware. Then try doing an alt+tab…
Check out the release notes for Firefox 1.5.0.1 http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/1.5.0.1.html which mention some leak fixes. Also refer to this memory leak progress list http://www.squarefree.com/2006/02/04/memory-leak-progress/
New tools are being used to detect leaks in Firefox and patches are being made. Despite Firefox’s initial flaws, the most notable thing is that they can be fixed, even by yourself if you want to. This is not like IE where you wait five years to get a problem resolved.
That is great people are finally putting good efforts into fixing memory leaks. I felt for a while that new features kept getting piled into Firefox but the memory issue just kept growing. I would like to see a release where no new features are added but all major memory leaks are patched. I guess when someome opens a blog about just firefox memory leaks then it is really a big problem.
thanks for the links, I have 1.5.0.1, but adblock might be the culprit. I switched to adblock plus now. Hope it helps.
/* removing dupe do to flood-prevention, please delete me */
Edited 2006-02-07 14:18
10th of February is actually _this_ Friday and not next week as I wrote in the news. I posted a correction but I guess I was too late. Sorry about that.
As for FF. I was kind of shocked by this. Considering how much time they needed to get to 1.5. And as for the feature list it looks like just a cosmetic makeover. Well, it’s still too early to tell..
10th of february is also my birthday.
This will be alpha1. Alpha2, beta1 and 2 are also planned.
Technically speaking, firefox 2.0 will be based on Gecko 1.8.1.
Trunk builds are tagged 1.9a1, and they will lead to fx 3.0 for june 2007.
The goal of fx 2.0 is to make a better firefox, based on a stable core.
The goal of fx 3.0 is to build firefox on a new core.
I’m pretty excited about Firefox 2.0. Even though its an alpha release I’m still going to give it a try. I’m eager for the new features.
Asa seems a bit too high on himself. He acts like he was the sole reason Microsoft updated IE. Don’t get me wrong, Firefox was part of the reason, not the whole and only reason. Yes, Microsoft did add some features that Firefox already has, but why not? They were good things to have in a browser. I really like IE 7’s RSS feed layout more than Firefox’s.
I loved reading his thoughts on IE7. For a few days now I have been using it to browse the internet and visit the daily news and blogs that go to every day.
I have to say there really is no difference anymore between it and firefox. IE7 is faster in most cases for me too.
However when it comes to extensions. My god thats the only reason for me to use Firefox…I can’t live without a few of those anymore D:
Also, asa is giving himself less credit than he even gives himself I think. He deserves every bit of of congratulations and the mozilla team.
All though these days I really want to try out camnio and shiira…but I don’t have a mac.
I like Firefox, in fact I use it as my primary browser though I may be switching to Opera 9 when final is released. In fact, I would use Firefox on every workstation in my school district, however it is not anywhere near as network/domain friendly as IE. In order for Firefox to work for multiple users of each workstation (of which I have many kids using particular machines throughout the day) you have to work in some hacks. IE is as simple as editing a few settings on either local or global polices and I’m all set for the entire domain.
Firefox should look beyond individual users now and attempt to penetrate the corporate/education market. Lord knows we could use the security features found in a few Firefox extensions. I am so tired of struggling against spyware it’s not funny.